Employment policy

The dynamics of inequality: what have we learned?

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In the final episode of the DIAL podcast we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives and what its longer term consequences might be. We’re joined by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen from the University of Turku in Finland. Elina is the Scientific Coordinator for DIAL and, as the programme draws to a close she reflects on some of the programme’s highlights,  key findings and implications for the future.  

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this final episode of the series, we’re delighted to be joined by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen, from the University of Turku in Finland. Elina is the scientific co-ordinator for DIAL and today, as the programme draws to a close, she’s here to reflect on some of the program’s highlights, key findings and implications for the future. So welcome, Elina thank you very much indeed, for joining us. Now, first of all, I’m guessing it’s been no mean feat and indeed, I know, it’s been no mean feat, keeping an eye across 13 fantastic research projects with researchers based all over Europe. But just take a minute or two, if you would to remind us of what exactly the DIAL programme is and what it’s involved over the last few years.

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  0:57 

So thanks a lot, Chris. The DIAL programme is, as you said, kind of transnational programme. And we’ve had 13 research projects involved. And all of those involve international collaboration. And it’s based in the social sciences and behavioural sciences, financed by NORFACE, which is a research organisation bringing together different funding institutes across Europe. And so the focus of DIAL has been on inequality and in particular inequality across the life course and trying to understand some of the structures of inequality cross nationally and some of the mechanisms kind of producing inequality and and what that means to people and societies as a whole.

Christine Garrington  1:41 

Wonder if I can ask you why it has been so important to look not just at inequality, per se, as you were saying there, but at how inequality manifests itself over the life course, because this is an important thing, isn’t it? And indeed how, when and where it sort of accumulates?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  1:57 

Inequality is a really complex and multifaceted issue. And so I think one one part of it is that inequality comes across in many different domains. So it’s important to take into account inequalities, for example, in education, labour market, health, and so on. And then I mean, to really understand where it comes from and what it means it’s important to look at the determinants across time, I mean, both across time for an individual and their parents, and so on, kind of that life course aspect, but also, for countries to see how it develops across time. Inequality isn’t something that just is, I mean, it develops. And so kind of building on that kind of developmental process to really kind of inform us about how we can do something about it, or how we can really kind of understand where it comes from, it’s important to take that into account.

Christine Garrington  2:58 

Now, you talked about the programme largely being based in the social sciences. But one of the key things about the project is that we’ve seen researchers from different disciplines as well as different countries coming together to try to tackle, as you say, as you rightly say, this incredibly complex area around inequality, what’s been the thinking there?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  3:20 

Well, I mean, inequality is something that interests a lot of academics working in different disciplines. And, and they come from it from from kind of different angles. And I think, because it is kind of a complex issue, and it’s an issue that kind of manifests itself in different ways. So really building on on the strengths of different disciplines, I think is a key key strength here. So we don’t only look at inequality in one domain, for example, say, say something like education, which would then be kind of a subset of disciplines that tend to be interested in inequality in education, but also how education is linked to inequalities in in other aspects and, and in addition to the kind of different domains that come from different disciplines, also, the ways in which we, we analyse it and building on the strengths and knowledge of different disciplines. I think is key here, key to, to just building a comprehensive picture and learning from each other, as well as as then taking that knowledge forward.

Christine Garrington  4:34 

It would be remiss of us not to talk about COVID. And in some ways, it was something of a setback for plans to to stage events and meetings around the the programme of research to get the word out there about it. But it also provided in some respects, a rather unexpected opportunity, didn’t it to use the programme to look at inequality in the context of COVID. So, so tell us a bit about that.

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  4:58 

Yeah, so obviously the research programme began before COVID. And so the projects had their their kind of plans of what they wanted to do and the analysis that they were going to do. But given this massive impact that COVID had on on society and and on inequality as well. A lot of projects then decided that this would be a really important aspect to look at and an opportunity also to learn about inequality in a changing societal context. So different projects have taken this into account in different ways. But for example, there’s been kind of really important work on on just what happened to inequality for example, due to lock down and and the economic upheaval of COVID, not just the health implications, but then also using that upheaval, to think about how inequalities might be changed. And for example, so work by Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez, Suzanne Harkness and Anette Fasang, looking at what happened to housework, during COVID. People were having to stay at home, both parents and children and seeing what happens to inequalities between men and women. And how the, the the number and age of children influences that and kind of what they saw was that obviously, this change in in family habits changed house work habits, but at the same time, when locked down ended a lot of couples returned to normal. So so even though there was a massive shift, and and people behaved differently for a short period of time, we can see that these kind of entrenched habits, then then go back to normal quite quickly.

Christine Garrington  6:43 

Yeah, really interesting piece of work that so. And also, despite COVID, you were able to, nevertheless, to involve a great number of stakeholders in in the research, what messages did you receive from them, I wonder about what was emerging?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  6:58 

So yeah, we’ve had some really interesting discussions with stakeholders, both policymakers and then kind of non-governmental organisations involved in both practical work and lobbying as well. And they’ve been really interested in in the work that we’re doing. So in particular, we’ve talked to stakeholders involved in kind of gender inequality work, and how participation in the labour market is unequal between men and women, and in particular, between mothers and fathers. And then we’ve also talked a lot to stakeholders involved in kind of childhood disadvantages, and how different types of children are put at a disadvantage. And what are some of the mechanisms kind of potentially either alleviating those disadvantages, or that are currently making those disadvantages larger, and that would kind of be important to look at. So we’ve kind of talked both about the the bigger picture of inequality, but also some of the mechanisms and obviously, stakeholders are, are often interested in what they can do. And then we’ve also had really good discussions about especially with policymakers also about the kinds of data that going forward, would be needed to, to kind of really analyse these things further. And I think there’s a lot of kind of shared interest in collecting data or making administrative data available for researchers to be able to address inequalities in the future.

Christine Garrington  8:28 

Yeah, now a major part of your role, Elina has been to pull together all of these different strands of work in some way to ensure that we get to a, what we hope is a coherent picture of what’s been learned from the programme as a whole. And I wonder whether it’s possible in the short period of time that we have to say what has been learned from the programme as a whole?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  8:48 

Well, that’s no mean feat. To then kind of say what’s been learned because I think there’s such richness in the research coming through and I mean, we’ve only kind of touched upon some of the aspects just now. And so we what we’ve been trying to do is, is bring together kind of thematically, things we’ve learnt in terms of, for example, gender inequalities, as I just mentioned. So So really looking at further at kind of motherhood, penalties and how, how those might be potentially for example, by by further training ameliorated although at the same time, we need to remember that women tend to nowadays have higher education levels than men. So education isn’t always the key here. So also looking at kind of gender and sexual minorities, even though we’ve been making progress in terms of legislation and policy. The discrimination can still be kind of an ongoing issue for people and and kind of the legacy of the past is still a major issue for for LGBT citizens across Europe and even though legislation has progressed a lot to still the practices in terms of, of workplaces or educational institutions aren’t aren’t really catching up necessarily, to such a large extent. And then moving on to kind of a different area, I think there’s been a lot of really interesting work in terms of, of the role of genetics, which is a big new area of research in terms of social sciences, and how that plays into the reproduction of inequalities across generations and over the life course, and how that changes depending on the environment that people live in. So, so we’re learning a lot about so called gene environment interplay, and which is obviously kind of something that social scientists are really keen to look at is the the environmental aspect of, of how genes play out. So so we’re learning a lot about the fact that genes aren’t our destiny as such, but but the the context or the environment matters a lot for that.

Christine Garrington  11:00 

Yeah, lots of really fascinating and very, very innovative work that’s going on in that area, for sure. Now, you’re talking about stakeholders a moment ago, you’ve been responsible also for helping to ensure the dissemination of this research to to those non-academics as well as other researchers. So I’m interested to know and I think others will be interested to know what sorts of resources there are available. For those interested to know more, aside from the obviously, the dozens, and I know, there are dozens of journal articles and working papers that have have been produced if you’d like for the scientific community. But what else is there.

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  11:34 

Starting from those journal articles, I think we’ve tried to make a kind of effort to make those more accessible in terms of both bringing them all to our website, but also providing summaries that are not just the academic abstract. So even looking at the journal articles, starting from from summaries that are more accessible to everyone involved, and not just researchers in those fields, I mean, abstracts can sometimes be a bit difficult to disentangle. Then bringing together the research we’ve we’ve been producing policy briefs that, I mean, obviously are aimed at policy audiences but I think those bring together thematically some of the research as well in a really nice way. So those are available on the on the website, then obviously, this podcast series, I think is has been a great way of disseminating the research. In addition to that, so we had our final conference last autumn. And some of those videos from the presentations are available still through the website. I mean, there’s both recordings of presentations that bring together entire projects, but also kind of individual, more finely specified research topics. But But in particular, there’s there’s videos of researchers presenting their whole project at the final conference. So I think those are also a great resource.

Christine Garrington  12:57 

Yeah, indeed, a wonderful library of materials that people can dip into at their leisure and really catch up on and get to grips with the important things that have emerged from this, this work. So finally, Elina, the ultimate aim of a programme like this is obviously to improve our understanding and knowledge on the one hand and influence change for the good with the understanding on the other. And I wonder if you’re able to say how, I know it’s very difficult, but if you can say how all this important work might feed into the thinking and policies of those seeking to reduce inequalities today, and in the future?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  13:32 

At the same time as advancing academic knowledge, we definitely have wanted these research results to be relevant for policymakers and to reach policymakers and indeed, kind of other organisations interested in in these types of inequalities and processes. I mean, on the one hand, there has been really great comparative work on the kind of institutional influences that policies in different countries have and I think that’s a really important thing to draw from in terms of, for example, education policy, or family policies for work life balance and the gender inequality in pay so, so looking at the across national differences and comparing countries and then learning from that. But then also, I mean, there’s been really detailed work into kind of the mechanisms of inequality and more specific interventions for example, and how those influence inequality and and then really digging more deeply into how inequality is reproduced and what we might be able to do about that. So for example, work on on parenting and how that reproduces inequalities among children and and then thinking about well, how we might be able to to provide more equitable parenting for children and what we can do about that. So I think there’s, there’s been work on multiple levels that hopefully we’ll be able for policymakers to draw on in terms of developing these things in the future.

Christine Garrington  15:07 

Thanks to Elina Kilpi-Jakonen, DIAL’s scientific co-ordinator for joining us for the final episode of this fourth series of the DIAL podcast. You can find all the resources that Elina mentioned in this episode on the DIAL website at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. We hope you enjoyed this episode, which is produced and presented by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts. And don’t forget to subscribe wherever you find your podcasts to access all our earliest series.

A level playing field for children: why it matters in tackling inequality over the lifecourse

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In Episode 5 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast we’re in conversation with Andreas Peichl, Professor of Macroeconomics and Public Finance at the University of Munich and Principal Investigator of a DIAL project looking at the impact of childhood circumstances on individual outcomes over the life-course (IMCHILD). 

Tackling inequalities in adolescence and working life

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In Episode 3 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast, we are in discussion with Richard Blundell. Richard is the Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL, director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the principal investigator of a DIAL project looking at human capital and inequality during adolescence and working life. In this episode we explore the work done by this project tackling inequalities in adolescence and working life.

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this episode, we’re delighted to be joined by Richard Blundell, David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL, and director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Richard is also the principal investigator of a DIAL project, looking at human capital and inequality during adolescence and working life. So welcome, Richard, thank you very much for joining us today.

Richard Blundell  0:40 

Thank you, Christine.

Christine Garrington  0:41 

I wonder if you can just start by telling us a little more specifically what this project has been investigating and why.

Richard Blundell  0:48 

Yeah, I’d be delighted to. What we’re looking at in this project is the evolution of inequality through adolescence and working life. Relating to the education streams, people choose how it affects their outcomes going forward into working life, what happens during working life, what kind of training seems to work, what routes to better jobs are for people who don’t, for example, go to higher education, university. Whether training can offset some of the gender gaps that we’ve been seeing opening up in the labour market, and whether choices in higher education matter for future labour market outcomes. So it’s very much about not the early years of school – there’s another project looking at that, that runs in parallel with our project, similar investigators, we’re working together with them. What we’re looking at here then is from adolescence onwards, and how the inequality evolves during adolescence and working life.

Christine Garrington  1:58 

So one area of focus has been women and work really very, very interested in in this, you’ve looked at the gender pay gap, the role of childcare, on women’s ability to return to work, and indeed, on the role of job training, among other things. So what would you say for you are the key things to have emerged from this particular area of work Richard?

Richard Blundell  2:18 

Yes, this is obviously absolutely central, the kind of pay gap between men and women and how it opens up through working life is something that’s been really hard to tackle and getting behind this, what are the drivers of it, and how to address it is really key to solving some of the most important inequalities that we see in working life. We’re working with researchers, mainly economists, and education researchers in Norway, in the UK and in France. That’s rather good, because those three countries have rather different systems of routes through education, into work, and different opportunities for women and men as they progress through their working life. And we wanted to understand what those differences could tell us about the gender pay gap. And therefore what policies could be perhaps most useful in addressing the gender pay gap.

Christine Garrington  3:25 

There are a couple of key things to come out of this one there.

Richard Blundell  3:28 

Some of its, you know, in some sense, pretty obvious. That is that work experience is really important for pay and for earnings as you go through your career for career progression. And of course, when children come along, women spend a fair amount of time not in work, perhaps still in employment on maternity leave, but not actually gaining the work experience that turns out to be so important in career progressions. We’ve kind of known that. But it’s become really acute, even part-time work is really not sufficient for women to keep up at work with their male colleagues. There are two kind of routes to addressing this. One is to provide good quality childcare, that can have two major benefits. One is it can provide good quality inputs and care for children, which is particularly important, especially in disadvantaged families. But it can also allow women to spend more time at work and developing their career profiles. There’s also a very large importance of mothers and fathers spending time with their children. And so when children come along, it’s kind of inevitable, really, that work may take second place, and that there’ll be less time engaged in work experience in progression. And remember, it’s exactly these years in the 20s and early 30s, where all the big career progression is made in working life, and women really fall behind there. So an alternative we’ve been looking at, and it turns out to be rather interesting is to work instead of on work experience, but on the human capital itself, once women come back into work.

Christine Garrington  5:25 

So what might that look like in reality, then Richard?

Richard Blundell  5:27 

So you can imagine the following scenario, a woman or a man, but unfortunately, it’s particularly typically, the woman who takes time off, once she returns to work, you can imagine her engaging in a training programme, and that can make up some of the loss. Well, we weren’t that optimistic about that to begin with. But we’ve become more optimistic for two reasons, particularly in the UK and in Norway. In Norway, using the Population Register, we can follow people, right the way through their working careers, we can follow the whole of the Norwegian population. It’s an exhaustive data set on everything everybody does – their qualifications, where they’re working, their family structure, and so on. And what we found is that it’s particularly successful for women to who’ve had a child early on in their career to return to some kind of schooling qualifications, and that can have a big boost to their career profiles and address some of the gender gaps that occur. In the UK it turns out similarly, women who returned to work spend quite a bit of time in training. And we found that that training, work related on the job training, it has to be accredited, and it has to be work related, those things have a payoff. And we feel that there’s real room for improving this type of training. It’s all part of designing education and training routes, during your working career, that work much better than the ones we currently have. And boy in in the UK, we’ve been training way behind in the organisation of formal routes into education and training through your working life, especially for those who don’t go to university.

Christine Garrington  7:29 

Now, I want to move on to talk about COVID. And obviously, although not expected when your project began, the pandemic, obviously, as well as being a terrible thing for us all did provide, however, what I’m guessing was quite a fascinating and important opportunity to look at the impacts of COVID on on people’s lives in this context of inequality. So what did you, what did you get to focus on there?

Richard Blundell  7:52 

Once we were into the first major wave of COVID, it was clear that it was going to exacerbate a lot of the inequalities during adolescence, during education and during working life, let alone health of course. The longer run impact that we’re seeing is on learning – the loss of learning, the loss of school time, the loss of engagement in learning, because of being not able to go to school, those children from deprived families have had much, much more learning loss over this period, than the privilege than children in more privileged families. It suddenly became clear that space was really important. But for learning for children, it was absolutely critical. If children didn’t have a quiet place with good digital access, a good setup for engaging in online classes, then that already put them behind behind. And there’s many studies showing there’s a huge gradient in space, in digital access, in access to these kinds of technologies across the income and and socio economic gradient. Losses have been extremely large, up to half a year of schooling loss for many, many children. The second point is that if you’re at home with educated parents, who are working from home and still have time to interact with you, you’re going to get that input from them. schooling is the great equaliser. It puts children from deprived backgrounds in an environment where they can learn perhaps things that they couldn’t learn at home. And that was taken away. The work on Norway and France shows exactly the same there. So learning loss, huge. This doesn’t usually happen in recessions by the way. This was very, very specific to COVID.

Christine Garrington  9:55 

And what about when you looked at matters related to work.

Richard Blundell  9:58 

All on the job training, apprenticeships just didn’t happen. In fact, for those in their early careers, you know – 18, 19, 20 – there was an almost complete end to apprenticeships. Apprenticeships fell back by 70% or more for that younger group, exactly the group that I was mentioning before. It’s vital that we get this on the job, accredited training, because they’re the ones not going to university, those going to university have been served rather better. I know from my experience here that we’ve at UCL, we’ve been keeping online classes and activities going at a pretty high level, actually. And the kind of students that we have here, can engage in that quite fully. But that’s very different for a student who didn’t make it to university, and who’s trying to gain their experience and training through apprenticeships, there’s just been no engagement. So this loss of learning has been huge.

Christine Garrington  11:11 

I’m interested to know whether women were worse affected than men in this context?

Richard Blundell  11:16 

We thought it might affect women more but in fact, overall in employment and what have you, it’s been pretty neutral in the UK, that’s just because of the structure of industry we have here. But it hasn’t been neutral at home. We’ve seen, of course, mothers and fathers both having to do more childcare, because schools have been closed during lockdown, or children have been at home during self-isolation, even in periods without lockdown. But mothers of taken, have borne the brunt of the childcare at home, we followed women and families in surveys throughout COVID. And found that although childcare activities have increased for both male and female parents, there really has been an extra load on women. And again, that’s going to affect their careers, and other aspects of their life going forwards. All those things that we were concerned about before COVID. And that were the absolute centre of this project have all become all the more heightened through COVID. And I think the policy recommendations that have come out of this project are very, very relevant for the post COVID world that we’re now entering.

Christine Garrington  12:41

Yeah, I wonder how how easy it has been? Or how difficult I guess it’s probably the better question to to feed those recommendations in such a fast moving event that COVID has been and, you know, was it possible for that to feed through all of those findings, all of those important things into the policy sort of making cycle in order to try to mitigate some of those impacts? Or, or was that that must have been very challenging.

Richard Blundell  13:09 

For policy makers, at least civil servants have been very open, of course, to try and to figure out what’s been going on. And remember, the initial policy responses, at least on simple measures of inequality have been remarkably successful. You know, we haven’t ever had a recession, really, where there’s been so much support thrown into the economy, of course, we’re gonna have to pay for that. But some of the short run impacts, I think were mitigated, what we’ve focused on here, are the longer run ones, you know the the loss of learning, the loss of training, the loss of work experience, they’re not showing up even yet, they’re going to show up in the next few years. And it’s critical, we have an opportunity now to address them. And there is a lot of interest across the whole policy world, and government and around the world. In addressing this. In fact, as part of this project, we fed into the G20 meetings last year in Rome, and a major part of our work was used to suggest a kind of coordinated approach to designing the best interventions now to address what’s been going on with loss of education, and loss of work experience and training across more or less the whole developed world.

Christine Garrington  14:27 

Really great to hear that there’s been such an appetite for findings like these important findings to feed into policy, but I guess the devil is in the detail, right?

Richard Blundell  14:37 

Unfortunately, these are gonna have to be huge programmes. And the thing about huge programmes is that they can be hugely expensive and not necessarily very effective. We need to get this right. We need to get these education interventions and these training interventions done in the most efficient and effective way. And that’s where we can learn from other countries that do at least some things better, some things worse, we’re all learning from each other. And this project which brought in, you know, Norway, which has a pretty effective system of education and training right across the board, not just for those going to university, which is where we tend to focus. And France, which has, again, a very different system. So we can learn, we can learn from that. But yeah, I see a long impact of COVID, not just long COVID. But it’s hidden a bit at the moment, by the way, because of the uptick in the economy. You know, there’s quite a demand for certain types of jobs, as you’d expect, when there’s, you know, we’re coming out of a big, big recession like that, but I’m pretty sure that that’s hiding these big losses, they will turn up over time. So yeah, there’s, there’s a big hunger for this. We’re feeding a lot of a huge amount and working a lot with Department of Education here with the Treasury on what what should be done with other policy groups. And similarly in Norway, and France.

Christine Garrington  16:08 

Now, I know we’ve talked about the labour market a bit, but I wonder whether there’s anything else that you really would like to stress about that side of things, because this was a major part of your work?

Richard Blundell  16:19 

We had to invent things on the hoof and everyone was involved in that the furloughs remember, the furlough system didn’t exist. In fact, in the UK, and in many other economies, we’ve not, we’ve not been particularly good at providing general what one might call social insurance. That is, if people fall on hard times get reduced earnings, you know, do we make up the difference? At least in the in the shortish run, we don’t particularly do that very well, in the UK, we target very low incomes. We have a very targeted universal credit and benefit system. So it does prop up incomes at the bottom. And it does that actually quite well. Not always administratively perfectly, but it does it. But if you look at someone who’s on a kind of lower middle income, which is the group that really was hit during COVID, there’s very little support for them. Universal credit doesn’t do a great job, it just doesn’t replace their incomes – the furlough system did it replaced 80% of their income. And, and it was very successful in doing that, to the extent that as I said, you know, income falls and inequality increases didn’t happen in the way they often do during recessions. So in that sense, these policies have been very successful. On the downside, you know, they’re the things I mentioned, they’ve been very good at short run income support, at least for for many groups. But they’ve not been very good yet at addressing these losses in, in human capital investments. And work is about two things. It’s about earning money today. And it’s about in investing in skills that will earn you even more, or give you a better career profile, at least in the future. And it’s those longer term investments that I feel, or a fear of being really left to one side.

Christine Garrington  18:17 

I wonder whether you’ve seen anything that relates to how these inequalities manifest in respect of where people live, where they come from, is there something around place that’s quite important as well?

Richard Blundell  18:28 

We kind of knew there were geographical differences and differences by family background, it just, you know, we can see that in workings of our society. But I didn’t realise how big they were. And I think it’s been quite a shock to us. It’s not surprising, you know, that the emphasis now is on levelling up, at least it’s suggested it is in education is very important. What we found in this research, you know, looking at how well people do at school, and then into university, if they go there, and then into work is really striking, you know, some areas of the UK, for example, and this would be true in other economies as well, by the way, very few children actually make it to university. Take areas like Grimsby or Skegness those kinds of places we almost think of as left behind communities, children just don’t do so well. And not only that, if they do manage to get into higher education, they often don’t return to those communities. So those communities, once you look at people in work that just have many, many fewer people with higher education qualifications and skills to other areas. Let’s call them the thriving areas, many of which are in the southeast or in the more successful cities. And these differences are really important because they’re having huge impacts in the way people think about their well being levelling up political discourse.

Christine Garrington  20:07 

You talked earlier a bit about their fabulous data in Norway that you had available to you. But we’ve also got some great data here in the UK, haven’t we, particularly when it comes to tracking young people through education?

Richard Blundell  20:20 

We have the National Pupil database that follows all children through school, through higher education, or through their education and training and into work right up to about the age of 28/29 now. So we’re, and that will go on. So this is a remarkable, a remarkable dataset of the kind that you would typically think of finding only in a Scandinavian country. So this has allowed us to do these differences. And we can look at two children doing exactly the same courses in the same university, and just look at the differences of outcome by parental background and they’re still there, they’re still quite important. So parental background really matters. But so does course choices and university choices. These things, I guess we knew that have a big impact. All these things that people are doing through their their education, and early working lives and at university have a long lasting impact. And many of the differences you can take back to geography, and parental background, and the early education investments. This is really providing a real detail in what’s driving the inequalities that we see at least in working, working careers.

Christine Garrington  21:47 

Yeah, on that note, I’d like to put a final question to you really about, you know, for those interested who in tackling inequality, obviously, including yourself and your fellow researchers, the wonderful team that you’ve talked about there. But for those who have responsibility for creating interventions through policy or practice, are there any essential takeaways, implications or recommendations for your project that you’d like to share?

Richard Blundell  22:11 

If there’s something we’re going to really have to address the in the UK and elsewhere it’s these geographic divides. It’s what is creating a lot of the political turmoil, I think, whether it be almost in any elections, we’ve seen the left behind areas. You know, the evidence is clear, these geographical divides, by socioeconomic background, and by areas are really important and long lasting. And it’s really up to us to figure out the best ways now, to address them as quickly as possible. They’ve been exacerbated through COVID and so they become even more urgent, I think, in the policy debate.

Christine Garrington  22:56 

And I guess my final final question, is there something specific that we should be focusing on?

Richard Blundell  23:03 

There’s a lot, but let me just pick on one, it’s a kind of old topic, it’s the it’s the point about good jobs. You can have successful interventions for people who come from, you know, backgrounds or haven’t been quite successful at education investments, you can make better choices during education. And we’ve seen how, with the data and work we’ve been doing, how that can be improved. But it’s really the match of the skills, the firms and the kind of work related nature of these training investments that’s so important. And what we have learned here is that, you know, small interventions on one aspect of this are not going to solve the problems. So you can think of the example of the, of just providing a job. What we’ve seen here is that just providing a job, say, Amazon warehouse job is not really going to help much with career profiles, you really need to match workers, develop their skills, and bring the right kind of firms that can enhance career profiles into these more left behind deprived areas. If we can get that to work, then there’s great hope that we can do something for the careers and wage profiles of people who’ve been doing rather less well than we’d like in society.

Christine Garrington  24:39 

Thanks to Richard Blundell for joining us for this episode of the DIAL podcast. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org and also on the IFS website at ifs.org.uk. Much of the work of Richard and his colleagues has also fed into the Deaton Review on inequality so do take a look there as well. We hope you enjoyed this episode, which is produced and presented by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts.

Why rich parents have rich children

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by Sreevidya Ayyar, Uta Bolt, Eric French, Jamie Hentall MacCuish, Cormac O’Dea

The children of rich families tend to go to better quality schools, have higher cognitive skills, and complete more years of schooling. This blog exploits unique data from the National Child Development study to determine these early childhood factors go on to have long-run impacts on an individual’s lifetime earnings, perpetuating a cycle of wealth. These results suggest that policies that equalise investments, such as improving school quality, could promote income mobility.

Rich parents have rich children. Why is that the case?

The children of rich families tend to differ from their poorer peers in multiple ways. They have fewer siblings and more educated parents. Their parents spend more time with them and send them to better quality schools. Their cognitive skills are higher, and they complete more years of schooling. All of these channels have been found to affect an individual’s earnings. However, in order to design policies to improve intergenerational mobility, we need to understand how these channels interact with each other in generating correlations in lifetime income across generations.

Take the example of school quality. Attending a high-quality school may have direct long-run effects on an individual’s lifetime earnings by creating a more valuable professional network, for example. However, attending a higher quality school can also have indirect effects on lifetime earnings through improved cognitive skills and/or the student staying in education for longer. Each of these channels are more likely to benefit the kids of richer parents, who tend to have access to better schools. In a new paper we use mediation analysis to quantify the different channels through which parental income can impact an individual’s lifetime income. We find that intergenerational earnings persistence is mainly explained by differences in investments received during childhood, which in turn drive differences in cognition, years spent in education, and ultimately lifetime earnings.

We exploit unique data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS), which initially surveyed families of the entire population of children born in one particular week in 1958 and has followed them up until today.  The NCDS contains rich information on: family income and circumstances during childhood, indicators of quality time that parents spent with the children, proxies for the quality of schools that they attended, measures of cognitive skills, as well as final educational outcomes and earnings throughout the lifecycle.

Table 1 shows gradients for some of our channels of interest by parental income tertile.  The table shows that children from high-income households have fewer siblings and more educated parents than those born to lower income parents. Teachers report that high-income parents are more interested in the education of their children.  Furthermore, children of high-income parents are more likely to go to schools where: parents attend educational meetings at age seven, student-teacher ratios are low at age 11, and a high fraction of students are doing GCEs at age 16 (an optional exam for progressing to further education).  As a result, children from richer households develop greater cognitive skills; at age 16, reading scores were 21% of a standard deviation higher on average for children with high-income parents compared to children with low-income parents.

Table 1 describes only a subset of the variables we use.  We combine these variables using a factor analytic approach to predict latent time investments, school quality and cognition, similar to Heckman et al. (2013).  The factor analytic approach allows us to use all measures available to us by treating them as noisy measures of school quality, parental time, and cognition.

Table 1 Sample means, by parental income

Table 1 Sample means, by parental income

Note: The final column reports P-values from the F-tests testing the null hypothesis of equality of means across parental income tertiles. The time investment measures are teacher-reported measures asked when the children are 7, 11, and 16. Teachers can evaluate parents as very interested, a little interested, not interested at all. We report the fraction of mothers and fathers who are very interested.

We find the intergenerational elasticity of earnings, or IGE (which is a measure of the relationship between parental and child lifetime income), to be 0.32 for men and 0.24 for women. The first part of Figures 1 and 2 shows the fractions of this relationship explained by differences in family environment, time investments, school quality, cognition at 16, and completed years of schooling when we only allow for direct effects of each variable on lifetime income. These variables explain over half of the IGE –– 54% and 62% for men and women, respectively (the remainder is explained by factors beyond the ones we consider, such as better job networks).

Figures 1 and 2 summarise the main for results for men and women respectively.

Figure 1

Figure 2

In the first panel of each figure, we find that years of schooling and cognition explain significant and large fractions of the IGE, both for men and women.  We then investigate whether schooling and cognition are driven by earlier life investments and family background.

In the second panels of Figures 1 and 2, we allow for indirect effects via years of schooling. For example, for cognition, we now additionally account for its effect on lifetime income via its effect on years of schooling. Doing so, we find that the fraction of the IGE that was previously explained by differences in years of schooling can actually be explained by differences in cognition, instead. This suggests that it is not parental income per se, but the higher cognitive levels of children of high-income parents that encourages higher educational attainment.

The next level of our analysis, illustrated in the third panel of each figure, addresses the sources of cognitive skills.  We allow for parental time investments, school quality, and family background to affect the IGE not just directly and via years of schooling, but also via cognition. We then find that the fraction of the IGE that comes from the cognition gradient can largely be explained by differences in time and school quality investments received during childhood. This is consistent with previous literature that has found significant effects of parental investments on cognitive development.

Lastly, we let family background – which comprises mother’s and father’s education, and number of siblings – have an indirect effect by affecting investments. Once we do so, family background explains 19% (34%) of the IGE for men (women). This contrasts with the zero effect of family background that we find in our baseline analysis. In other words, family background matters, but only because it affects investments, which then affect cognition and years of schooling. This result is consistent with Carneiro et al and Akresh et al. who find that increases in parental education lead to more favourable child outcomes. However, we also find that even if we control for family background, the remaining parental income gradient of investments explains 28% of the IGE. This suggests that higher parental income directly leads to higher investments in children, and not only runs through family background, a point which we have developed in greater detail in a forthcoming paper. This supports Bastian and Lochner’s (2021) conjecture that the increase in financial resources from programmes such as the Earned Income Tax Credit are what drives improvements in child outcomes.

Thus, we conclude that the main driver of intergenerational earnings persistence are differences in investments received during childhood which subsequently leads to improved cognition and more years spent in education.  Many of these investments, such as school quality, are the subject of public policy debate.  Our results suggest that policies that equalise these investments could improve income mobility.

The Intergenerational Elasticity of Earnings: Exploring the mechanisms, is research by Uta Bolt, Eric French, Jamie Hentall-MacCuish and  Cormac O’Dea.

Extending working life: what needs to change to make policies work?

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In Episode 13 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne discusses findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project (Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. 

 

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we’re talking to Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne about findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. I started by asking her to talk about the policy backdrop to the research

Nicky LeFeuvre  0:25  

Over the last 10 or 12 years there has been this quite widespread consensus about the need to extend working lives and this consensus has existed at national levels, you know, government initiatives, also across international organisations like the OECD, and the dominant narrative has been based on kind of two or three basic assumptions this inevitability of increasing full pension age, to keep pace with life expectancy. Questions about the sustainability of our existing welfare systems, pension systems, and also a discourse around personal individual choice and personal responsibility. You know, this idea fielded by the OECD that people are increasingly free to construct their own biographies and so there has been this sort of focus on rewardingly later retirement or penalising early retirement in actual fact, and relatively little concern for the inherent, I would say dynamics of accumulated inequality that lie behind this policy objective. And so this was very much something that we wanted to address in the in the DAISIE project and of course, it was completely in line with the overall aims of the DIAL programme. And our sort of particular focus was to say okay, individuals are receiving this policy discourse which is relatively homogenous across the board, and what are they doing with it? Okay, how is this really impacting on their lives? And notably, how is this being interpreted and acted upon by their employers, by the occupations that they’re in? And to what extent their past life experiences, particularly their employment histories, and the way that their past employment has been articulated with their care duties if they happen to be women? How is all this coming together to produce a, what we presume would be quite a varied experience of what extended working life actually means for individuals and for organisations, to be honest.

Christine Garrington  2:28  

Yeah, now that brings me very nicely on to my next question, actually, because in recent years, policymakers have really recognised the need, the importance of taking, you know what we talked about as a life course approach to this issue, something you’ve just hinted at, and, and this is something that really resonates with your research. Tell us why this is so important.

Nicky LeFeuvre  2:45  

I think there has been it’s been slow to come, but it is there, I would say, perhaps emerging recognition that rather than full-fledged recognition at the moment of the need to avoid the accumulation of individual disadvantages over the life course in terms of extended working life and this is related to health issues. You know, we do not age equally, people are not as equally able to envisage extending their working lives and they’re also not as equally motivated to do so. So that this recognition has come or is coming slowly. And in the most recent OECD document, for example, which is entitled working better with age, there is this idea that perhaps there has been too, too much of focus on these financial incentives. So making it you know, financially penalising people for leaving the labour market too early with the too being in speech marks and the need to address what is often termed demand side barriers to extended working life. And I really do like this this quote from the OECD that now recognises the fact that we need workers who want to work longer and also employers who want to employ them, and I think this is really the crux of the issue here. You know, there’s there is this emerging shift towards the recognition that this is not just about individual choice that these extended work, working life issues are related to a whole host of structural constraints and opportunities. And this is really what we were wanting to do in the DAISIE project. It does really resonate with us because we were arguing that it is important to look beyond macro level policies and to study exactly how they are being interpreted how they’re being applied by employers and by individuals according to the you know, particular histories and their particular circumstances. So yes, this this really was very exciting for us, because we did see this policy shift on the horizon, as we were, you know, preparing to to address those issues in the project.

Christine Garrington  4:58  

Yeah, that’s great. That’s a really neat summary of the backdrop to this work. So let’s move on then. And if you could give us an outline an overview of what the DAISIE project has actually been doing?

Nicky LeFeuvre  5:12  

We set out to adopt what we called a multi-level research design, because we wanted to integrate as I just said, the policy background obviously you can’t completely abstract this out of your reasoning. So we did want to look at the similarities or the variations in these extended working life policies across countries and see whether there were some best practices or some policy recommendations that were being really adopted across the board and others that were perhaps, you know, more localised in certain contexts or certain countries. So we wanted this macro level analysis of working life practices, but also the objectives that were that were being defined by by different policymakers, either at the EU level or in particular countries. We also wanted to sort of micro socio sort of individual analysis. So we wanted to explore particularly the well-being, the health and the work life balance issues that older workers were facing. So we knew we wanted to use biographical accounts we wanted life history interviews, we wanted really to be able to get at the experiences of older workers, which are kind of slightly invisiblised in the policy documents. And in order to integrate those two levels or those two scales of analysis, we needed the mezzo level which is the sort of intermediate level the occupational and the organisational level, as I said previously, often sort of left out of existing analyses in order to look at what was happening in different employment sectors. And therefore, we adopted this case study method where we selected three different occupations or three different sectors: finance, health and transport. And with our sort of cross-national comparative perspective, we then looked at these three sectors that we could compare both within with other sectors within the same country and across countries to see whether these extended working-like issues were being addressed and implemented to the same extent and in the same ways in different sectors and in different countries.

Christine Garrington  7:20  

Such an ambitious programme of research and also at a very challenging time with everything going on with COVID.

Nicky LeFeuvre  7:27  

Carrying out empirical fieldwork during the COVID pandemic was a little bit challenging for us. But what we’ve actually done is cross country and cross sector comparative analysis using case studies that we carried out in the five countries and in three different sectors as I said, health sector, health sector, finance and transport. We have collected a huge amounts of empirical data, qualitative data to a large extent. We’ve used biographical interviews with older workers, male and female workers, and we have about 500 of these interviews across the board. We have of course prepared English language summaries of these interviews because we have to now compare them comparatively and they were not carried out all in the same language. So as you can imagine, this is slightly challenging. And we’ve also done about 60 expert interviews and we met up in each country and each company we went into we met with the human resource managers, we we talked to line managers, trade union representatives, and so on, to get a feel of how ageing at work was being framed in these different institutions. And we have a collection of about 500 life course grids, which enable us to kind of visualise the life course events that led up to people ageing at work, if you like. So the family events, the residential ability events and of course, their employment histories that frame the ways in which they are now thinking about whether they’re going to retire at what age they want to retire, whether they could envisage extending their working lives and under what circumstances. So quite quite a wealth of data. We’re starting to get to grips with along with a secondary statistical analysis that we did previous to the to the case studies.

Christine Garrington  9:12  

So what are the sort of the first things, most the things that you did early on Nicky I think was to map older workers employment trends, what were the key things to emerge there?

Nicky LeFeuvre  9:22  

We were really interested in looking at cross national differences here. And of course, we do see and that’s not you know, that’s unsurprising given given the convergence in the policy measures that I mentioned earlier. We do see a convergence of the employment rates, basically in the 55 to 64 year age group, I would say. So if we look at the data over the past 10 years, the differences between countries have been reduced. We still have about, you know, up to 20% difference in employment rates at 55 to 64. So this is not negligible at all, but the differences across countries are becoming smaller. So there’s there’s this idea of a kind of norm of extended working life, but remember, I’m talking about 55 to 64 here so what we’re really looking at is actually encouraging people to work up to full retirement age and very little actually about encouraging people to work beyond full retirement age. I think that’s a you know, quite an important point to remember when we’re talking about ageing at work. In actual fact, we’re looking at 55 to 64. And that’s where you know that the changes have been over recent years. The other important thing to remember is that there has been a slight reduction in the gender gap in retirement timing. Over the same period, women do continue to retire earlier than than their male counterparts in in almost all of the countries we’ve looked at. And of course, that’s why they they are to a certain extent the prime targets of many extended working life policies in recent years. But the the gap in the retirement, the actual retirement age of men and women has been falling. And that’s also very interesting because it means that the gender dimension of what it means to age at work becomes particularly important to look at in detail.

Christine Garrington  11:18  

So although as you said, you looked across a number of employment sectors, we’re going to be focusing in on the finance sector for our interview today. So my first question is why the finance sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  11:28 

We were trying to decide which sectors to focus our case studies on. Several criteria were taken into consideration. One of them was of course the gender composition so we wanted sectors that was sort of contrasting in terms of the share of male and female workers. So healthcare was our sort of highly feminised sector transport our highly masculinised and finance our sort of gender balanced sector. Then we wanted sectors where the share of older workers was quite variable. And finance actually is the sector where we have the lowest share of older workers of the three sectors we looked at we have more or less depending on countries there is some variation around 20 to 30% of over 50 year olds in the finance sector, which is let’s to give an example half the rates of older workers in employment compared to the transport sector for example. So quite a low share of older workers in finance. And this is obviously related to the history of the of the sector of the occupation. Which is an occupation which has been downsizing and restructuring for the past 20 to 30 years. And where older workers have in most countries been targeted during these restructuring, downsizing operations and have often been offered various early retirement packages, or at least some older workers, mostly male managers, in fact, have been offered packages. And so the finance sector has kind of lopped off a whole generation. And this means that today, it is one of the sectors were that were older workers are relatively underrepresented. But it’s a sector that is now facing a number of challenges whether these rather generous early retirement packages have become financially non-viable, and where there’s also been some recognition that the accumulated experience of older workers, actually the banks actually needed that experience in order to face the new challenges. And so there is a shift in policy and this was also very interesting for us.

Christine Garrington  13:39  

Okay, let’s move on to some numbers then. What were you able to see in terms of the share or the proportions of the numbers of older workers in the finance sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  13:47  

So, the moment we have a very, very small share of older workers, if I give you just you know, some figures for example, in in the Czech Republic, only 10% of men working in the finance sector are aged over 50 in 2019, but 20% of women in the Czech finance sector are aged over 50. So this is also interesting. It’s one of the rare sectors where, proportionally speaking, the share of older women, as compared to the whole female workforce is greater than the share of older men as part of the male workforce. And this is quite a rare configuration in sort of the European labour markets at the moment. So that was also something that we were very interested in exploring further.

Christine Garrington  14:31  

So let’s dig now into some of the rather wonderful data that you’ve been collecting, especially that qualitative data so when you asked workers about their experiences of being older employees in this sector, what were some of those key things that come out of that? Of what they told you?

Nicky LeFeuvre  14:46 

Well, perhaps I can, I can start with a rather eloquent quote from one of our Swiss interviewees, and I mean you have to take this against the backdrop of this very sort of systematic offloading of older workers over the past 30 years from the banking sector, and one of our interviewees said sort of almost in a whisper “ageing is something we just don’t talk about in this bank”. And this really I think, translates quite nicely how stigmatised the question of ageing is within the banking sector. We came across a lot of negative stereotypes about older workers. Older workers are systematically presented as lacking skills, being unable to keep up with the pace of organisational and technological change. And to a certain extent, this is of course the banks justifying their past age management policies which were almost entirely based on externalising ageing at work if you like, getting rid of their older workers, before they actually had to deal with ageing at work. And so in a lot of our interviews, ageing was seen as either something that could possibly enable one to leave the finance sector well before reaching retirement age. So you know showing that you were not able to adapt was seen as as a as a good reason to to leave early, or as something that was quite risky in that the bank could therefore consider you to be too old and and not flexible enough to face the challenges of this digital revolution that’s going on in in banking, and therefore you could be made redundant because you were not keeping up with the pace of things. So basically, there was this idea that age is something that we don’t talk about and older workers are a great pains to prove to their employers and to the themselves and to their colleagues, that they are actually not part of this terrible stigmatised group that one would call older workers.

Christine Garrington  16:56  

So some quite unexpected views expressed there about this whole issue of being an older worker, and what are the implications of that for any sort of age management policies that any business might want to put in place in this sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  17:10  

Any kind of age management strategies that are adopted in this in this context, are destined to fail basically, because people refuse to be identified with a stigmatised group. That would be the target of you know, these age management policies, and therefore, even when there are minimal measures, I mean, we didn’t have a huge range of age management measures that we came across in our case study banks but most of them were related rather to the transition to retirement. So you know, accompanying workers in the transition to retirement, which we consider not really to be age management policies at all because this is you know, this is thinking about how to get rid of your older workers still, rather than thinking about what you do with them when they stay. But even in in those cases, there was a very, very low take up rate because nobody really wanted to run the risk of being identified as an older worker, because this was such a, you know a stigmatised category, and no one wanted to be demoted, or no one wanted to be encouraged to leave because they were part of that group.

Christine Garrington  18:13  

So Nicky, there seems to be a real disjunct – a real mismatch here between the sort of policy top level policy narrative that you outlined earlier and what you’re actually hearing on the ground from workers. You know, what, what’s your take on all of that? How does this chime with that policy narrative that you were outlining?

Nicky LeFeuvre  18:29  

Yes, so I mean, I think these results do, really do tell us that any serious attempt at extending the duration of our working lives requires the active involvement of employers in the business sector as a whole. It’s it’s quite incredible I think that we should find such a small share of older workers in a non-manual sector like banking, where the physical limitations to you know working longer in terms of health and well-being should in theory be far more limited than in the health sector or in the transport sector, but actually, we find the opposite. We find that finance, in finance we have a small share of older workers. So this really does confirm that postponing retirement is not only about health, it’s not only about financial incentives, and it is very much about how older workers are perceived within particular sectors, how they are treated by their employers, and particular I think in those parts of the job market that are looking to reduce staff costs that are looking to scale down their activities or who are confronted with technological change or organisational restructuring. Then, then we really do have to accompany I think companies in in looking at how they, how they frame the whole issue of, of ageing and working.

Christine Garrington  19:51  

Something I found quite extraordinary in in your research was that when you spoke to companies they expressed, expressed a reluctance or hesitation to introduce any age related policies for fear that this would somehow be seen as discriminatory in some way. What’s your take on that?

Nicky LeFeuvre  20:08  

We had a number of examples where HR managers line managers went to great lengths to explain to us that they couldn’t offer any positive support to their older workers because this would be seen to be discriminatory towards other groups of workers. And so we were kind of left a little bit speechless at this thinking, but what interpretation of equal opportunity is being developed here? And why is it that companies believe and they do apparently strongly believe that any accommodation of ageing in organisational structures in the way that work is shared  out or the way working time expectations or or shift work organisation – anything that would facilitate the experiences of older workers identified as a group with potentially some needs that are different to those of other age groups. This should not be seen as discrimination. This should be seen as equal opportunity policy, and it shouldn’t be seen as coming into conflict, for example, with gender equality policies or with parental support policies or whatever other objectives companies are seeking to meet. So I think, really applying or emphasising the need to think equal opportunities in an intersectional way looking at how gender and age and ethnic origin and disability and so on, interact across the life course and how employers can deal with these in innovative and creative and complex ways. I think this would be really something very useful because we were struck by this, this difficulty that that organisations were facing in thinking through what they could actually do to support their, their older workers.

Christine Garrington  22:05  

You did make a number of quite clear recommendations for employers and policy makers in the work that you’ve done. Can you just talk us through those?

Nicky LeFeuvre  22:12  

The need for organisations I would say, you know, policymakers at the national level, international level, but also within companies to recognise that there is a potential mismatch. In fact, in the older workers we are talking about as a target group for extended working life policies. Spontaneously when we when we talk to to employers about the kind of older workers that they would be interested in keeping on that they would be interested in training or that they would be interested to target for bridge schemes or for unretirement schemes as they call it and so this possibility of employing retirees back perhaps on a on a reduced rate. Companies do have quite clear, clear image of the kind of worker that they would be interested in in involving in those kinds of schemes. Unfortunately, those images do not equate very well with the profiles of the workers who are actually motivated and interested in extending their working lives. Who tend not to be the most highly qualified or who tend not to be the workers who have continuous employment histories. Who have had haven’t had any major health events during their adult life course, who haven’t had any significant care commitments that have taken them out of the labour market, who have relatively comfortable financial arrangements made for their latter years and so on and so forth.

Christine Garrington  23:37 

So among the people you spoke to then, who was motivated to extend their working lives and why? 

Nicky LeFeuvre  23:45  

Workers can also be motivated because for example, they have developed their careers quite late on in life. So maybe they are just moving into a management position because they’ve had, if they’re women, they have had some years out of employment for family reasons. We also had a number of very interesting testimonies from older women saying that continuing to work longer was actually very attractive to them, because it was one way of avoiding being swamped by care duties that they could be expected to take charge off in later life. So either you know, being on call for grandchildren or being available for elderly dependent relatives. This idea that continuing to work was actually a way of avoiding being overwhelmed by by these care expectations was something perhaps something we were not expecting to find to such a wide extent. And so quite clearly, women like that who are interested in extending their working lives as long as their working conditions are adapted to their needs are not being identified at the moment as resources that employers could call upon, and people that the employers could have in mind when they think about how they are going to manage age. You know what strategies they’re going to put in place and how they’re going to start, operationalizing their age management policies before people become old you know before people get to within two or three years of retiring.

Christine Garrington  25:20  

So is there a simple message in all of this?

Nicky LeFeuvre  25:22  

Making it clear that they’re the kind of people that employers would spontaneously think about as their target group for extending working lives are not necessarily primarily the people who are interested in extending their working lives, but there are other groups who are highly motivated to work for longer. I think this is you know, one message that we can pull out of the research that could translate into some quite exciting and quite innovative policy decisions on the ground as it were.

Christine Garrington  25:55  

Dynamics of accumulated inequalities for seniors in employment is a DIAL research project, looking at the gendered impacts of policies and an extended working life. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which was presented by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.